Maybe it really was an impossible task. The two previous entries in the Disney trilogy simply left too many things unanswered and the general lack of an overarching leitmotiv prohibited a cohesive narrative which could have served as a framework for the new protagonists. Without that framework Rey, Finn and Poe remain shallow placeholders for a story that never was and without heroes there could be no villain to match them.
'The Rise of Skywalker' then tries to pull every heartstring available and presents us with a whole bowl of memberberries but those strings aren't attached to anything and those memories only remind us of what we have lost with the way the sequel trilogy handled beloved icons from a galaxy far, far away. This movie left me drained rather than elated and I walked out of the cinema with a sense of emptyness and loss. The movie looks great but essentially it was all for nothing. One of the greatest stories in movie history ends in a wishy-washy whimper.